World Cup Fever

In the endless ‘Soccer v. Football’ debate which mirrors the ‘Mac v. PC’ debate in its futility and fervor, and is actually a subset of the much larger ‘US v. The world’ debate, many people miss the real reasons (I think) the US tends to look at soccer in a bad light. There are in fact 3 reasons why the US has such a lackluster interest in world soccer: 1. Branding 2. Proximity and 3. Clear strategy.

1. Branding
I’m surprised more people don’t pick up on this one, as it’s the number one thing that sets US sports apart from world ones. When you turn on the TV on Sunday afternoon in November, what do you see? You see The Seahawks playing The Broncos, not just Seattle playing Denver. The stadiums are outfitted in each team’s (2 simple) colors, there’s mascots running around in front of cheerleaders, and this not only strengthens a team’s brand, but gives something a fan can attach to and associate with in regards to the team they root for. When all you’ve got are Argentica, Portugal, Cameroon and Senegal, with foreign-looking jerseys in similar colors, it gets hard to care about who’s playing. A second level of branding also occurs at the player’s level. You’ve got John Elway, Joe Namath, Troy Aikman, etc. all of whom are all-American players with all-American names that kids can grow up from childhood idolizing. Soccer’s stars are foreign to American audiences and come from countries far away. I’m not proud of it, but that makes Americans less likely to care about them. There’s truth in that.

2. Proximity
Soccer takes place on a giant field that is only (on our sports radar) matched by (American) football. There are 2 more players per team on the field and the action is fast and moves from one side of the field to the other in rapid speed. Now, compared to hockey or basketball, this is something we should like, right? The problem is that those 2 sports take place on much smaller scales than soccer and we tend to like to be able to see the players faces when they’re on TV. Like it or not, this is important. Whenever I see soccer broadcast on TV, the camera is zoomed way out in order to capture all the action as well as possible. Whereas football takes place on 100 yards, sure, but every yard is a marker, with larger ones every 10 yards. And really it repeats backwards after 50. When watching football, the action mostly takes place on a 10-20 yard section of field that is very easy to keep track of. But soccer has few field lines (much like hockey) with a moving one in regards to someone being offside. Which leads us to our next point…

3. Clear strategies
In football and baseball, a ‘play’ is a clear piece of strategic action that takes place over usually a very short amount of time. In basketball, you’ve got a specific amount of time after getting the ball to make a shot. Hockey has built-in rules, icing being one of them, to shorten intense play down into sizable nuggets. Soccer has similar rules (throw-ins, corner kicks, etc) but these do very little to allow us to watch a replay of the last few seconds and get a clear picture in our mind of the strategy behind the action. There might be 10 seconds after a penalty is called in soccer before the kick takes place. Not enough time to understand if you’re not accustomed to soccer and certainly not enough time for a commercial (see #1 from a network’s point of view). It’s easy to understand why a quarterback throws a deep pass, it’s easy to understand why a hockey goalie covers up a puck, it’s easy to see why the pitcher runs to first base when the first baseman needs to field the ball. These strategies are easy, concise and known to us. But soccer strategies/plays are often so complex that we miss the finer points of why something happened the way it did.

So this post is way too long by this point, but suffice it to say that while these points are certainly not positive and speak volumes about American attention spans, they’re true, I think. A lot of why we don’t take to soccer on a national level is because it’s simply very alien when opposed to what we’re used to.

Now, I’m sure any soccer-fan has great, thought-out rebuttuals to these comments, but the point is that Americans are so subconciously into our own sports that there’s not much room for anything else on a national scale, and that all of these things are what we perceive soccer to be, whether that’s a negative thing or not.

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